UK should lead on open-access publishing, says report

The UK should lead the way in transforming scientific publishing from a "reader pays" model to an "author pays" model. That is the main conclusion of a 140-page report released today by an independent working group of academics, publishers, librarians and representatives from learned societies. Led by the British sociologist Janet Finch, the 15-strong working group includes Steven Hall, managing director of IOP Publishing, which publishes physicsworld.com.

Commissioned by the UK government, the report notes that the Internet has had a profound impact on how scientists access peer-reviewed research papers, with nearly all articles now being available online. However, many journals are subscription based, which means that they can only be accessed by researchers working at institutions that have taken out a subscription or those who are willing to pay a one-off fee to access individual articles on a pay-per-view basis.

Some researchers therefore feel that subscription-based journals are preventing the results of government-funded research from being more widely disseminated, arguing that it should be freely accessible in the public domain – a view that the report describes as both "compelling" and "fundamentally unanswerable". Proponents of this "open access" model say it would not only benefit researchers in smaller universities and poorer nations that cannot afford subscriptions, but also help inventors and small businesses by giving non-academics access to scientific and technical knowledge.

The challenge in making the transition to full open-access publishing will be to decide who should pay the not insubstantial cost of running peer-review systems, publishing the papers and maintaining and upgrading the complex online systems that underpin most modern journals. The Finch group has come down firmly in support of the "author pays" model, whereby scientists pay an article processing charge (APC) before a paper is published. This model is already used in part by a number of scientific publishers, including IOP Publishing, which has run New Journal of Physics in this way since it was launched in 1998 with the German Physical Society.

The report calls on UK research councils – which provide the bulk of public research funding – to "establish more effective and flexible arrangements to meet the cost of publishing in open-access and hybrid journals". Based on an APC of about £1750, the group believes that a move to open access would cost the UK an additional £38m per year. The report also says that the UK government must spend an extra £10m per year to extend its current licences on reader-pays journals to provide wider access to this material in the higher-education and health sectors, with publishers also providing "walk in" access at public libraries at no charge.

A further £3–5m per year, the report argues, would need to be spent on open repositories of scientific reports that have not been subject to peer review. Such repositories, it suggests, could contain work done at a university or institute – or done UK-wide in a specific discipline. The report also cites a one-off transition cost of £5m, putting the total cost of the transition to full open access at about £50–60m per year. This, it says, is "modest" compared with the £10.4bn that the government spends every year on research and development in the UK.

One challenge facing the UK if it leads the move to open access is how to apportion APCs when research is published by an international collaboration that includes one or more UK-based scientists. According to the report, about 46% of papers met this criterion in 2010 and a clear policy would have to be put in place to decide who pays for what – and what to do if foreign funding agencies refuse to pay their share.

Response and reaction

David Willetts, the UK's minister for universities and science, has welcomed the report, saying that it will shape the government's forthcoming policy on open-access journals. "Opening up access to publicly funded research findings is a key commitment for this government," he says. "Proposed initiatives such as providing access to findings for small companies and making peer-reviewed journals available free of charge at public libraries would foster innovation, drive growth and open up a new area of academic discovery."

The response from the publishing industry has generally been positive. David Hoole, marketing director of Nature Publishing Group that publishes the Nature suite of journals, says that the company "welcomes the balanced approach of the Finch report, and its recognition of the need for a mixed economy, of licensing subscription content, self-archiving and open-access publication". However, Hoole warns that the small number of papers published in highly selective journals such as Nature will require APCs higher than those acknowledged in the report.

Timothy Gowers, a mathematician at the University of Cambridge who is involved in a boycott of the commercial publisher Elsevier, told physicsworld.com that while he welcomes the general direction suggested by the report, he does not think it sufficiently acknowledges the "very large" profits that he says publishers make. "The report recommends moving to a more open system, which I strongly support," says Gowers. "But I would have liked to have seen a bolder report that also recommended taking steps to move to a cheaper system that covers the costs of publishers but significantly reduces their profits."

Any move to open access will also affect UK-based learned societies such as the Royal Society, the Institute of Physics and the Royal Society of Chemistry, all of which publish journals on a not-for-profit basis. "The report clearly recognizes the challenge that the transition poses to learned societies," says Peter Knight, president of the Institute of Physics. "With more than two-thirds of the Institute's charitable projects funded by the gift-aided profits from our publishing company, IOP Publishing, it's crucial to us that the shift is managed carefully."

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7 comments

Finch Report: a Trojan Horse

1. The Finch Report is a successful case of lobbying by publishers to protect the interests of publishing at the expense of the interests of research and the public that funds research.

2. The Finch Report proposes to do precisely what the (since discredited and withdrawn) US Research Works Act failed to do: to push "Green" OA self-archiving (by authors, and Green OA self-archiving mandates by authors' funders and institutions) off the UK policy agenda as inadequate and ineffective and, to boot, likely to destroy both publishing and peer review - and to replace them instead with a vague, slow evolution toward "Gold" OA publishing, at the publishers' pace and price.

3. The result would be very little OA, very slowly, and at a high Gold OA price (an extra 50-60 million pounds per year), taken out of already scarce UK research funds, instead of the rapid and cost-free OA growth vouchsafed by Green OA mandates from funders and universities.

4. Both the resulting loss in UK's Green OA mandate momentum and the expenditure of further funds to pay pre-emptively for Gold OA would be a major historic (and economic) set-back for the UK, which has until now been the worldwide leader in OA. The UK would, if the Finch Report were heeded, be left behind by the EU (which has mandated Green OA for all research it funds) and the US (which has a Bill in Congress to do the same -- the same Bill that the recently withdrawn RWA Bill tried to counter).

5. The UK already has 40% Green OA (twice as much as the rest of the world) compared to 4% Gold OA (less than the rest of the world, because it costs extra money and Green OA provides OA at no extra cost). Rather than heeding the Finch Report, which has so obviously fallen victim to the publishing lobby, the UK should shore up and extend its cost-free Green OA funder and institutional mandates to make them more effective and mutually reinforcing, so that UK Green OA can grow quickly to 100%.

6. Publishers will adapt. In the internet era, the research publishing tail should not be permitted to wag the research dog, at the expense of the access, usage, applications, impact and progress of the research in which the UK tax-payer has invested so heavily, in increasingly hard economic times. The benefits -- to research, researchers, their institutions, the vast R&D industry, and the tax-paying public -- of cost-free Green Open Access to publicly funded research vastly outweigh the evolutionary pressure -- natural, desirable and healthy -- to adapt to the internet era that mandated Green OA will exert on the publishing industry.

If the UK %Gold is currently lower than the current %Gold globally [as measured by Laasko/Bjork's latest estimates], the likely explanation is that where cost-free Green is mandated, there is less demand for costly Gold.

That makes sense: it shows why paying for Gold, pre-emptively, now, at today's asking prices, while still locked into subscriptions, instead of just providing cost-free Green is a foolish strategy - and it makes the recent recommendations of the Finch report even more counter-productive. The time to pay for Gold is when global Green has made subscriptions unsustainable, forced publishing to downsize to peer review alone, and released the subscription cancelation funds to pay for it on the Gold OA model. Then, and only then, will Gold OA's time have come.

Journals are... magazines

Good stuff Steve. I empathise with the research publishing tail should not be permitted to wag the research dog. Journals are essentially magazines. Why should they have so much control over physics, and take so much profit from it?

For those of you struggling to understand Steve's post (I had to go read his paper to understand), here is a summary:

Green Open Access (OA) = institutions self-archive and make available all their publications, if this becomes wide-spread then publishers could be reduced to providing just providing peer-review services. They would not pay for archiving and so this would be cheaper.

Gold OA = As suggested in the article above, publisher's do everything the same as now, but the author pays and not the reader as it is now. As the publisher is doing more, it would cost more and resistance to going to OA would be larger than the Green option.

I'm not clear on why journals would allow Green OA, are we not putting copy-righted material on a server for others to access freely? That sounds like piracy...

k.l.hermanson:</b] "…publishers could be reduced to providing just providing peer-review services. They would not pay for archiving and so this would be cheaper"

When mandatory Green OA self-archiving in institutional repositories reaches 100% globally and makes subscriptions unsustainable, it is not just archiving for which there is no more market, hence no need: The print edition and its costs are gone. The online edition and its costs are done. Access-provision and its costs are gone. The distributed global network of Green OA institutional repositories does it all. The only thing left for journals to do is to manage the peer review.

k.l.hermanson:</b] "Gold OA = As suggested in the article above, publisher's do everything the same as now, but the author pays and not the reader as it is now. As the publisher is doing more, it would cost more and resistance to going to OA would be larger than the Green option."

With pre-emptive Gold OA publishing today, publishers are not doing more, they are just being paid more (subscriptions + inflated Gold OA fees, if a hybrid subscription/Gold publisher; inflated Gold OA fees if "pure" Gold OA publisher). And authors are paying more. With Green OA, publisher s are paid subscriptions, as now, authors pay nothing, and they self-archive their refereed final drafts so they are accessible to all users, not just those whose institutions subscribe to the journal in which they are published

k.l.hermanson:</b] "I'm not clear on why journals would allow Green OA, are we not putting copy-righted material on a server for others to access freely? That sounds like piracy..."

Yes researchers are putting their research findings on a server to access freely: That's OA, and that's what researchers want. Researchers are not selling their articles for royalty income, they are giving them away so they can be accessed, used, applied, built-upon, cited. That's called research impact and progress. And that's why research is conducted by researchers and funded by the public.

Post-Green-OA Gold

martinjnmcdonagh"How will researchers without grants be able to afford to publish? in particular in the third world and the humanities? This move will shrink the research base"

The Finch Report's recommendation to fund UK's Gold OA pre-emptively, while UK and worldwide subscriptions are still being paid, and are still paying the costs of publication, would, if heeded, certainly waste a lot of UK money, needlessly, and probably reduce UK publication rates too. It would also reduce or end the growth of cost-free Green OA in the UK (and globally, if emulated).

But if Finch is ignored, as it should be, and the UK (and the rest of the world) instead increases and upgrades Green OA self-archiving mandates from funders and institutions, the world will gain 100% OA at no extra cost, and then this Green OA will induce cost-cutting, downsizing, and a transition to Gold OA at a much lower price, paid for out of a fraction of the institutional subscription cancelation savings.

Pooled reserves to cover the low peer review costs of unaffiliated or unfunded authors will be established. No point worrying about that now.

Implications of open access

Implicit in the open access proposals appears to be an attempt to increase the number of non-academic readers of scientific articles and I believe I have seen suggestions that this should be used to encourage a change of format ie to make authors use more conventional language. I believe that this could be counter productive for anyone seeking to read a paper written in a language which is not their native language. My experience before retirement was that, with practice, and knowing the structure and relatively limited vocabulary involved, I could make considerable sense of scientific papers in other european languages even though I could make little sense of literary works in those languages. This might be a suitable subject for some research, perhaps involving one of the languages which is not widely used in Europe to test the relative comprehension by foreign readers of papers written in 'conventional scientific' and 'non scientific/conventional' formats.